The psychological thrill of "seeing the danger".

I don't claim to be a psychologist, I have no formal training, I don't even know anyone who has BECOME a psychologist.

That being said; I have a brain and have made it a point to try to discover what makes it tick, exploring the fringes of knowledge, danger, taste, and fear.

Wanna know something a LOT of people fear? Radiation! Specifically of the ionizing variety (even if people don't know what that really means).

Let's get some housekeeping out of the way. No, the following objects do NOT emit ionizing radiation.

• Cell Phones
• 5G Towers
• Microwave Ovens
• Laser-pointer style lasers

What's the point of this post? I've mentioned before that I carry a Radiacode 103 on me almost every day, including at work. This often acts as a fun, informative conversation-starter. Every now and then; though, you get someone who is overly paranoid (being paranoid is generally a good rule of thumb when it comes to radiation, but being informatively paranoid is even better!).

Anyway, the story goes; I leave the detector on my workbench and a coworker walks up and asks about it. "Cool! Time to be informative!" I think. He asks what the numbers mean and I tell him "This is how many radioactive particles are detected per second." (It was about 3 CPS at the time, very low rates). And to my surprise he became visibly panicked and was worried about cancer immediately!

Now at this moment I realized some more explanation was in order. I explained that 3 CPS is essentially nothing and is completely safe, and oftentimes lower than average when it comes to background radiation. I didn't want to overload the conversation with the difference between CPS and μSv/hr. I made it a point to show some video of my collection where numbers reached 70-80 CPS. This helped shift the conversation from fear to curiousity.

I wish there was a more formal conclusion to this, but by the time we got to this point in our conversation it was lunch-time and everyone dispersed to their cars or the break-room

To tie everything back to the title of this post, it's easy to see a number and assume it's immediately a life-sentence when you don't know what you're actually looking at. In no way do I expect any random individual to be curious to most specific things in life, I'm happy I was able to explain things in a digestible way in order to make him feel more comfortable with what he was seeing.

This goes for all technical fields, if you're knowledgeable in a certain topic, spread it! Help people to understand what you do in your regular day-to-day. Information is so free to share now, but it feels like you need a pry-bar in order to actually get information on certain topics at times.

My next post should include some spectra that I've been collecting recently, I've been gathering background spectra from various places that I'm normally at. Soon I will go further into gamma spectroscopy and characterizing / pinpointing various isotopes from samples I've collected.